Looking at the photos I wonder how the construction can be robust against the sideways movements of the 100-150kg person+train. The rail just rests on the pylons, there is no reinforcement that prevents it from toppling sideways. Also the pylons themselves are just pricked into the ground, I see no sideways support bars or so. Apparently these sideways forces are absorbed by the railtrack as a whole. But for a long straight section I would worry that that does not work any more.
Maybe a mechanical engineer in the audience can enlighten me?
And, on a side note: can somebody explain to me his remark at the last page of the Tour: This picture just screams "only in America," doesn't it? I find his project very beautiful, but what's so American about it? Is it really unimaginable for US citizens that this kind of impressive creative tinkering also happens in other countries?
I am shocked. I found LoTR a beautiful movie in all aspects except for the music! I had to do my best not to hear it, and failed, in particular in the ending scene which was ruined by that horrible flute, so gratuitously copied from the Titanic movie. After the movie I was totally confused, almost angry: how could they put together such dazzling animations, good actors, great story and then blurb it all with this mellow supermarket-grade synthetic background noise? Like I said in my title: the music in LoTR is like a moustache on the ML. And now they get an Oscar awarded for that? Incredible. Absolutely incredigle. Today the Oscar prizes lost for me all meaning.
If fragmentation is such a big deal, then why do you never read about defragmentation tools for gnu/linux (or unix in general)? I know that it exists for Windows (one of the few things I know about that OS) since had to do a defrag before I could install linux so that I had a dual boot machine.
So, while I wrote this post I decided I should do my homework first. On Freshmeat I found a defrag program for linux, but it seems to be totally dead, abandoned since 1998. On sourceforge a search for defrag only gives a hit for some Windows application. A Google search finally points me to a Debian page which advertises exactly the kind of defrag program I was looking for. The buglist shows that it is still being maintained, but there does not seem to be much going on (which might be a sign of stability, but the developer could have tried to impress me with promises to support more filesystems than only ext2, minix and xiafs). Why isn't this program a standard solution that makes fragmentation a non-issue? Do people here have experience with this tool?
I live in Europe, where the legal climate is slightly different from the US. But corporate legal intimidation is not a purely US phenomenon. The KaZaA case was filed in The Netherlands, the KIllustrator case in Germany, etc..
Actually, I realize now that by reading so much Slashdot I think I know more about the US legal issues on internet, copyright, etc. than those of my own country! There are or will probably be some overlaps but also some differences; it would make sense to have a European equavalent of EFF; does anybody know about equivalents of EFF in Europe (In a previous story I saw that there does exist an EF of Australia)? Are there a European versions of chillingeffects.org (in the making or already existent), do you have experiences with them?
Despite my love for Mono as a tool for writing GNOME applications and giving developers new tools to write code in less time, there is an extra advantage in having a free implementation of the.NET Framework for Unix:
Windows developers know how to write code for it.
Lets make it easy to bring developers from the Windows world into our platform.
...
It can also work the other way round. A programmer wants to work in the best or most convenient programming environment. You (Mono developer) must be damn sure that your implementation of the.NET Framework is at least as attractive as the Microsoft's; otherwise the linux community might loose programmers via this route. But Mono will have less features of.NET implemented, or at least much later than MS; that has bad consequences for the appreciation of the programming environment. I'm afraid this means, in terms of the recent BCG study, that you will keep the believers and the fun/adventure seekers, but you will loose the skill enhancers and the professionals.
The part about the Institute of Virology and Immunoprophylaxis (IVI) is thick with symbolism. Browsing at +2 I do not see any references to it, though, and the story is already more than an hour old. The desktop issue absorbs all the attention (I am very happy with my own linux box but absolutely not willing to evangalize/force/hypnose others into using linux as well, let them choose for themselves, but maybe I am selfish/shortsighted).
Am I the only one to find it extremely funny to think of a virologist in a clean room, staring at a lively petri dish next to his PC, phoning Microsoft and saying in a low, slow, thoughtful voice: "There's a bug in here somewhere"...?
Well, maybe I am just silly and pointing out the very obvious. I should leave my cubicle and get some food & sleep.
I am using kernel 2.0.35 on my machine at work, it's SuSE 5.3 I think. For our research we wrote a whole bunch of analysis programs and scripts that work fine with the setup we have (with this SuSE machine and some similarly configured machines).
At the moment I am writing my thesis so all I need is vim, latex and xfig; occasionally I rerun parts of the analysis, to regenerate plots for instance. There just isn't any reason to upgrade; only security-related things like ssh are upgraded. I upgraded my home machine, out of curiosity and to try out the new programs. I did not find anything that I really want in my daily work but couldn't simply compile on this machine. Well, occasionally, but then I just login to one of the newer machines around.
As a matter of fact, I have worked with this machine for many years now and I know all its quirks and powers. By the sound of the hard drive I know what it is doing, so to speak. As a kid I read a few Western books by Karl May, where one of heroes (I think his name was Sam) carried around a very old battered gun, kept together with the 19th century equivalent of duct tape, probably; and yet this gun was a very dangerous weapon in his hands and not for all gold in the world would he ever dump this gun in favour of some shiny but anonymous newer one. I feel similarly about my friend, my old 350Mhz pc with its ancient kernel.
Well, it's only four years old. C'mon.
I suppose that there are many more and better examples of much older equipment and software which still serve solidly and happily as reliable tools. Just because they have all functionality that's needed, no additional unneeded BS features and working just fine.
My thesis will be finished very soon. I will have to say goodbye to my dear machine. It will be hard time.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Microscopic Robots for kievit (303920).
I am sure Slashdot was presented to me with that line four days ago. Today it said in the morning that a Cadre of Random Chickens was in charge, and now a team of Stealth Ninjas, but Friday it was done by microbots. Really.
I am not very familiar with maglev technology but as there are very strong and rapidly changing fields involved I would worry about the induction currents in any metal parts of the spacecraft. I am thinking of overheating due to large induction currents, damage to sensitive & expensive electronics, magnetization, erasing memory in chips, etc..
Some problems can probably be avoided with Faraday cages, and taking care that wires do not enclose large inductive areas. And maybe these issues are just not more serious than usual for a not so gentle event such as a rocket launch. Or maybe you can really confine the fields to the magnets/coils in the rail and in the launching component of the craft, with relatively very small stray fields?
Could anybody with background knowledge about space- or aircraft or large EM fields comment on this?
I could view 2 winners and 2 runner ups before the site was slashdotted, but they did not in the least approach the funniness of this
brilliant piece. It dates from 1995 or so (yes, spam already existed by that time). I do not know the original source; the linked mail dates from Jul 15 1995, maybe it is even older.
So: the news sources are confusing (natural phenomenon in crises). do we have
a boeing 767 OR an airbus 300 crashing (previous posts)
or
a boeing 767 AND an airbus 300 crashing (I would conclude that from your post)
From the article it might seem that we the Standard Model (SM) has been checked for 20, 30 years and this would be the first time to find something that is not predicted correctly. That is not the case:
In June we got the news from the Sudbury Neutrino Oscilloscope that from the detection rates of muon-type and electron-type neutrino's coming from the Sun we should conclude that neutrinos oscillate (change type) and are therefore massive, which is in full contradiction with the SM.
In March this year the results of the 1999 data of the muon g-2 measurement at Brookhaven National Laboratory showed that the (anomalous) magnetic moment of the muon is not described correctly by the SM. This 'magnetic moment' indicates how much the spin of a muon is affected by a magnetic field (a bit like how quickly a compass needle reacts to a new orientation of the compass). This measurement generated lots of theoretical ideas for mods of the SM and/or signs of supersymmetry and what not.
The Standard Model is ugly.
And I am now probably also failing to mention other important failures of the SM.
Why do people still believe that encryption guarantees privacy? Ridiculous!
A few months ago I read here on Slashdot (and that was also a quote, I forgot from where) a good description of the important difference between secrecy and privacy: "What you do in the bathroom is not a secret, but it is private."
To ensure privacy in electronic communication you can use encryption. For secrecy you might consider steganography.
What you are asking for in your post is secrecy, not privacy. The civil right to privacy is much easier to agree on than the right to secrecy.
Secrecy itself should never be a crime. If there is a crime, it is the action/message that is cloaked in secrecy. There are cases where secrecy is:
- perfectly allowable (e.g. contract negotiations between companies; organizing a surprise party for your colleague),
- not illegal but immoral (e.g. adultery)
- both illegal and immoral (no example necessary).
The government is targeting that last case. I think everybody agrees that that is perfectly OK, that is what they are for. But the government should make clear in there plans that they will recognize these distinctions; and we at Slashdot should also keep the discussion clear and not mix these things up.
I see an analogy between guns and secrecy. Both have their legal and illegal uses. Laws about gun control and laws about secrecy control are both problematic (especially in the US).
Since I've been working at home, I've found that I do tend to get distracted much easier by various activities, but it's not always what you think. I'm married with 2 kids, so my house isn't exactly a "working environment" by any means. So when I'm not thinking about loading up Half-Life, I've go my daughter wanting me to read stories to her or play her computer games with her.
Sounds like you are working in the living room or so. I think working at home will only work (if your have a family, living alone makes these things easier) if you arrange some office space in your home, preferrably a separate room, which you only use for work. Teach your family that you should never be disturbed when you are in your office. Best would be if you also have a work computer, without any games (keep the other computer with the games in living room or so). Being in an dedicated workspace also helps to keep you concentrated on work, compared to sitting in the same space where you have your family life.
I hope Bush learns from this that the worst threat on the US is not coming from 'nuclear missiles from rogue states', that anybody wanting to do evil has way more basic methods available. Cancel that silly project, the money can be used to recuperate the cities after this horror day.
People are calling for revenge. I don't know, which target would you try to hit in revenge? "Terrorism will never win" I read, but if you decide to retaliate with lots of high tech violence, killing again lots of innocent citizens (in Palestine, Afghanistan or whereever you think you should drop your bombs), I think that exactly then terrorism *has* won. Terrorists want war, you should not give them that pleasure. But I have to admit that I do not know an alternative strong answer to the crimes that were committed today.
These are just my thoughts. I am European, sitting moderately safe (still) in Amsterdam. Maybe if I were American I would have thought something else.
I am horrified by what I saw, heard and read today. I hardly dare to think about the consequences, whether the world politics are stable enough deal with this catastrophe wisely. I even feel a little silly when I write this, I am only 31 years old, I have only a very naive idea about what 'wisely' means in this case.
I wish all of you all the best. These are crazy times.
Programming is creative art. I love it. To make money with software in a traditional business model I would have to do paperwork, like getting lawyers to write intimidating licenses, doing financial administration and deal with all kinds of dirty tax issues. All extremely boring ugly things that would spoil the joy of creating something nice. In the Open Source model I (the developer) am not harmed by those.
Disclaimer: I am not yet an open source developer, in the sense that I wrote a program and submitted it to freshmeat/sourceforge or so. You may call me a wannabee. First I have to finish my &*^%$ thesis, when that's done I'll plunge into one or a few project and/or start one myself. Well, I have some already, and a herd of ideas, but I would not dare yet to show it to others. I submit bugreports and comments to the work of others, by way of passive contribution to the OSS world.
The post says "only today" but that only holds for the (directness of the) link. If you now (Wednesday or later) follow that link you can click "feature archive" and get the article; or you could try this link which should bring you directly to the article (modulo the e-mail thingy, probably; the link gets me there directly because I have their cookie now and I am too lazy to find out how to remove individual cookies in Netscape).
Their debts are USD 430,000. The prices of their games range from USD 20 to 50. So if 10,000 slashdotters buy 1 or 2 games they have enough cash to pay the debt. Ten thousand, that is not a ridiculously big number.
(I have no idea how much of the price is production cost; to solve the problem completely they probably need something like 100,000 purchases, amounting to a fourth of all slashdotters ever registered buying a game, which is getting less probable).
No, no, no... MS loves this patent. Drop your naive faith in fair competition and the goodwill of the corporations, and listen to my cute little conspiration theory: Microsoft will not fight, it will probably partner or even buy McAfee, thus swallow this delicious patent and become an even bigger and more Evil Empire. Ha!, they even helped McAfee to bribe / blackmail / threaten those poor little USPTO officers into accepting the patent in its most general form. When later somebody complains about it (muttering something about monopolies or so) they (MS) can blame McAfee and say they only bought McAfee out of self defence.
I completely agree with ( him ? her ? What's a Willeke ?.) Both in the "lot of fun" and in the "proves nothing" part of it.
"Willeke" is a Dutch female name.
And I would like to add that I agree with a previous post by nick_davison about the materials: the article states that the first 400 pound lifting kite was made out of nylon and nothing is mentioned about the materials of the newest one; I assume that it is again made out of modern materials. Could you also construct such a kite completely out of would/linen/cotton/iron and whatever was available, able to withstand the big forces?
...of a speech synthesizer that has no problem at all with swearing and obscenities is Stephen Hawkings' speech synthesizer. He seems to have a second career as a gangsta rapper. Listen to his mp3s and be amazed...
...of MicroSoft & similar companies is to make money. Selling software is their means to attain this goal. The only thing that counts is maximum financial profit. You make more profit (at least, on the short term) with closed source.
The Ultimate Goal of OSS developers is to create Beautiful Software. Money is a secundary issue (you need to buy a computer and a cup of coffee). The only thing that counts is the pleasure of programming and the quality of the result. The result gets a lot better with an open source (for obvious reasons).
OK: if MS's software is not good the customers will complain. That is a modest urge for MS to improve the software (cheepo comment: "not so much urge in case of monopoly"), otherwise the customers will buy less. The quality of the software is determined balancing development cost and customer dissatisfaction.
OK: you can try to make money from OSS. But that is not the first issue (for OSS developers).
I think this summarizes many of the issues. Somebody wrote 'do not blame capitalism' or so. This is not about blame. This is about choosing priorities; do I write software in order to earn money or just because I love it? (Both, in many cases, but which one is in the first place?)
Mundy tries to tell us that OSS does not produce good, reliable software. That is nonsense. The only point is that you can make less money with OSS than with CSS (closed source software). Of course he is not honest about this; after all, commerce has nothing to do with telling the truth (except when there is a financial urge to tell the truth, under legal threats for instance).
Cox and Torvalds point out how the passion for programming of OSS developers results in better software than greedy companies can ever produce. But OSS advocates should also have the courage to say aloud that for OSS making money is simply not the first priority at all. That is not really pleasant to hear for the OSS-based companies, but it should be admitted.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe a mechanical engineer in the audience can enlighten me?
And, on a side note: can somebody explain to me his remark at the last page of the Tour: This picture just screams "only in America," doesn't it? I find his project very beautiful, but what's so American about it? Is it really unimaginable for US citizens that this kind of impressive creative tinkering also happens in other countries?
So, while I wrote this post I decided I should do my homework first. On Freshmeat I found a defrag program for linux, but it seems to be totally dead, abandoned since 1998. On sourceforge a search for defrag only gives a hit for some Windows application. A Google search finally points me to a Debian page which advertises exactly the kind of defrag program I was looking for. The buglist shows that it is still being maintained, but there does not seem to be much going on (which might be a sign of stability, but the developer could have tried to impress me with promises to support more filesystems than only ext2, minix and xiafs). Why isn't this program a standard solution that makes fragmentation a non-issue? Do people here have experience with this tool?
Actually, I realize now that by reading so much Slashdot I think I know more about the US legal issues on internet, copyright, etc. than those of my own country! There are or will probably be some overlaps but also some differences; it would make sense to have a European equavalent of EFF; does anybody know about equivalents of EFF in Europe (In a previous story I saw that there does exist an EF of Australia)? Are there a European versions of chillingeffects.org (in the making or already existent), do you have experiences with them?
The part about the Institute of Virology and Immunoprophylaxis (IVI) is thick with symbolism. Browsing at +2 I do not see any references to it, though, and the story is already more than an hour old. The desktop issue absorbs all the attention (I am very happy with my own linux box but absolutely not willing to evangalize/force/hypnose others into using linux as well, let them choose for themselves, but maybe I am selfish/shortsighted).
Am I the only one to find it extremely funny to think of a virologist in a clean room, staring at a lively petri dish next to his PC, phoning Microsoft and saying in a low, slow, thoughtful voice: "There's a bug in here somewhere"...?
Well, maybe I am just silly and pointing out the very obvious. I should leave my cubicle and get some food & sleep.
I am using kernel 2.0.35 on my machine at work, it's SuSE 5.3 I think. For our research we wrote a whole bunch of analysis programs and scripts that work fine with the setup we have (with this SuSE machine and some similarly configured machines).
At the moment I am writing my thesis so all I need is vim, latex and xfig; occasionally I rerun parts of the analysis, to regenerate plots for instance. There just isn't any reason to upgrade; only security-related things like ssh are upgraded. I upgraded my home machine, out of curiosity and to try out the new programs. I did not find anything that I really want in my daily work but couldn't simply compile on this machine. Well, occasionally, but then I just login to one of the newer machines around.
As a matter of fact, I have worked with this machine for many years now and I know all its quirks and powers. By the sound of the hard drive I know what it is doing, so to speak. As a kid I read a few Western books by Karl May, where one of heroes (I think his name was Sam) carried around a very old battered gun, kept together with the 19th century equivalent of duct tape, probably; and yet this gun was a very dangerous weapon in his hands and not for all gold in the world would he ever dump this gun in favour of some shiny but anonymous newer one. I feel similarly about my friend, my old 350Mhz pc with its ancient kernel.
Well, it's only four years old. C'mon.
I suppose that there are many more and better examples of much older equipment and software which still serve solidly and happily as reliable tools. Just because they have all functionality that's needed, no additional unneeded BS features and working just fine.
My thesis will be finished very soon. I will have to say goodbye to my dear machine. It will be hard time.
I am sure Slashdot was presented to me with that line four days ago. Today it said in the morning that a Cadre of Random Chickens was in charge, and now a team of Stealth Ninjas, but Friday it was done by microbots. Really.
I am not very familiar with maglev technology but as there are very strong and rapidly changing fields involved I would worry about the induction currents in any metal parts of the spacecraft. I am thinking of overheating due to large induction currents, damage to sensitive & expensive electronics, magnetization, erasing memory in chips, etc..
Some problems can probably be avoided with Faraday cages, and taking care that wires do not enclose large inductive areas. And maybe these issues are just not more serious than usual for a not so gentle event such as a rocket launch. Or maybe you can really confine the fields to the magnets/coils in the rail and in the launching component of the craft, with relatively very small stray fields?
Could anybody with background knowledge about space- or aircraft or large EM fields comment on this?
I could view 2 winners and 2 runner ups before the site was slashdotted, but they did not in the least approach the funniness of this brilliant piece. It dates from 1995 or so (yes, spam already existed by that time). I do not know the original source; the linked mail dates from Jul 15 1995, maybe it is even older.
So: the news sources are confusing (natural phenomenon in crises). do we have
a boeing 767 OR an airbus 300 crashing (previous posts)
or
a boeing 767 AND an airbus 300 crashing (I would conclude that from your post)
- In June we got the news from the Sudbury Neutrino Oscilloscope that from the detection rates of muon-type and electron-type neutrino's coming from the Sun we should conclude that neutrinos oscillate (change type) and are therefore massive, which is in full contradiction with the SM.
- In March this year the results of the 1999 data of the muon g-2 measurement at Brookhaven National Laboratory showed that the (anomalous) magnetic moment of the muon is not described correctly by the SM. This 'magnetic moment' indicates how much the spin of a muon is affected by a magnetic field (a bit like how quickly a compass needle reacts to a new orientation of the compass). This measurement generated lots of theoretical ideas for mods of the SM and/or signs of supersymmetry and what not.
- The Standard Model is ugly.
And I am now probably also failing to mention other important failures of the SM.Why do people still believe that encryption guarantees privacy? Ridiculous!
A few months ago I read here on Slashdot (and that was also a quote, I forgot from where) a good description of the important difference between secrecy and privacy: "What you do in the bathroom is not a secret, but it is private."
To ensure privacy in electronic communication you can use encryption. For secrecy you might consider steganography.
What you are asking for in your post is secrecy, not privacy. The civil right to privacy is much easier to agree on than the right to secrecy.
Secrecy itself should never be a crime. If there is a crime, it is the action/message that is cloaked in secrecy. There are cases where secrecy is:
- perfectly allowable (e.g. contract negotiations between companies; organizing a surprise party for your colleague),
- not illegal but immoral (e.g. adultery)
- both illegal and immoral (no example necessary).
The government is targeting that last case. I think everybody agrees that that is perfectly OK, that is what they are for. But the government should make clear in there plans that they will recognize these distinctions; and we at Slashdot should also keep the discussion clear and not mix these things up.
I see an analogy between guns and secrecy. Both have their legal and illegal uses. Laws about gun control and laws about secrecy control are both problematic (especially in the US).
I see a pleonasm there. Shouldn't it be OS X.1?
Since I've been working at home, I've found that I do tend to get distracted much easier by various activities, but it's not always what you think. I'm married with 2 kids, so my house isn't exactly a "working environment" by any means. So when I'm not thinking about loading up Half-Life, I've go my daughter wanting me to read stories to her or play her computer games with her.
Sounds like you are working in the living room or so. I think working at home will only work (if your have a family, living alone makes these things easier) if you arrange some office space in your home, preferrably a separate room, which you only use for work. Teach your family that you should never be disturbed when you are in your office. Best would be if you also have a work computer, without any games (keep the other computer with the games in living room or so). Being in an dedicated workspace also helps to keep you concentrated on work, compared to sitting in the same space where you have your family life.
I hope Bush learns from this that the worst threat on the US is not coming from 'nuclear missiles from rogue states', that anybody wanting to do evil has way more basic methods available. Cancel that silly project, the money can be used to recuperate the cities after this horror day.
People are calling for revenge. I don't know, which target would you try to hit in revenge? "Terrorism will never win" I read, but if you decide to retaliate with lots of high tech violence, killing again lots of innocent citizens (in Palestine, Afghanistan or whereever you think you should drop your bombs), I think that exactly then terrorism *has* won. Terrorists want war, you should not give them that pleasure. But I have to admit that I do not know an alternative strong answer to the crimes that were committed today.
These are just my thoughts. I am European, sitting moderately safe (still) in Amsterdam. Maybe if I were American I would have thought something else.
I am horrified by what I saw, heard and read today. I hardly dare to think about the consequences, whether the world politics are stable enough deal with this catastrophe wisely. I even feel a little silly when I write this, I am only 31 years old, I have only a very naive idea about what 'wisely' means in this case.
I wish all of you all the best. These are crazy times.
Programming is creative art. I love it. To make money with software in a traditional business model I would have to do paperwork, like getting lawyers to write intimidating licenses, doing financial administration and deal with all kinds of dirty tax issues. All extremely boring ugly things that would spoil the joy of creating something nice. In the Open Source model I (the developer) am not harmed by those.
Disclaimer: I am not yet an open source developer, in the sense that I wrote a program and submitted it to freshmeat/sourceforge or so. You may call me a wannabee. First I have to finish my &*^%$ thesis, when that's done I'll plunge into one or a few project and/or start one myself. Well, I have some already, and a herd of ideas, but I would not dare yet to show it to others. I submit bugreports and comments to the work of others, by way of passive contribution to the OSS world.
The post says "only today" but that only holds for the (directness of the) link. If you now (Wednesday or later) follow that link you can click "feature archive" and get the article; or you could try this link which should bring you directly to the article (modulo the e-mail thingy, probably; the link gets me there directly because I have their cookie now and I am too lazy to find out how to remove individual cookies in Netscape).
Their debts are USD 430,000. The prices of their games range from USD 20 to 50. So if 10,000 slashdotters buy 1 or 2 games they have enough cash to pay the debt. Ten thousand, that is not a ridiculously big number.
(I have no idea how much of the price is production cost; to solve the problem completely they probably need something like 100,000 purchases, amounting to a fourth of all slashdotters ever registered buying a game, which is getting less probable).
No, no, no... MS loves this patent. Drop your naive faith in fair competition and the goodwill of the corporations, and listen to my cute little conspiration theory: Microsoft will not fight, it will probably partner or even buy McAfee, thus swallow this delicious patent and become an even bigger and more Evil Empire. Ha!, they even helped McAfee to bribe / blackmail / threaten those poor little USPTO officers into accepting the patent in its most general form. When later somebody complains about it (muttering something about monopolies or so) they (MS) can blame McAfee and say they only bought McAfee out of self defence.
I completely agree with ( him ? her ? What's a Willeke ? .) Both in the "lot of fun" and in the "proves nothing" part of it.
"Willeke" is a Dutch female name.
And I would like to add that I agree with a previous post by nick_davison about the materials: the article states that the first 400 pound lifting kite was made out of nylon and nothing is mentioned about the materials of the newest one; I assume that it is again made out of modern materials. Could you also construct such a kite completely out of would/linen/cotton/iron and whatever was available, able to withstand the big forces?
...of a speech synthesizer that has no problem at all with swearing and obscenities is Stephen Hawkings' speech synthesizer. He seems to have a second career as a gangsta rapper. Listen to his mp3s and be amazed...
...of MicroSoft & similar companies is to make money. Selling software is their means to attain this goal. The only thing that counts is maximum financial profit. You make more profit (at least, on the short term) with closed source.
The Ultimate Goal of OSS developers is to create Beautiful Software. Money is a secundary issue (you need to buy a computer and a cup of coffee). The only thing that counts is the pleasure of programming and the quality of the result. The result gets a lot better with an open source (for obvious reasons).
OK: if MS's software is not good the customers will complain. That is a modest urge for MS to improve the software (cheepo comment: "not so much urge in case of monopoly"), otherwise the customers will buy less. The quality of the software is determined balancing development cost and customer dissatisfaction.
OK: you can try to make money from OSS. But that is not the first issue (for OSS developers).
I think this summarizes many of the issues. Somebody wrote 'do not blame capitalism' or so. This is not about blame. This is about choosing priorities; do I write software in order to earn money or just because I love it? (Both, in many cases, but which one is in the first place?)
Mundy tries to tell us that OSS does not produce good, reliable software. That is nonsense. The only point is that you can make less money with OSS than with CSS (closed source software). Of course he is not honest about this; after all, commerce has nothing to do with telling the truth (except when there is a financial urge to tell the truth, under legal threats for instance).
Cox and Torvalds point out how the passion for programming of OSS developers results in better software than greedy companies can ever produce. But OSS advocates should also have the courage to say aloud that for OSS making money is simply not the first priority at all. That is not really pleasant to hear for the OSS-based companies, but it should be admitted.